The Exchange: Patrice Evans on “Negropedia”

Patrice Evans didn’t set out to be an expert on race. Following his split with his hip-hop group, the Blue Room, in 2006, he created, on a whim, The Assimilated Negro—an insightful absurdist blog. But it soon acquired a large following, and he left music behind to become a full-time writer: he currently writes his blog and contributes to Grantland, ESPN’s online literary sports magazine. His new book, “Negropedia: The Assimilated Negro’s Crash Course on the Modern Black Experience,” is a humorous collection of essays, including “The Argument For Obama Dap Day” and “Will ‘Keeping It Real’ Ever Go Right?” Over drinks and chicken schnitzel at the Bohemian Hall & Beer Garden in Astoria, Evans broke down for me the science behind “Neo-Negro America” and explained why David Foster Wallace is the literary equivalent of Eminem. An edited version of our conversation appears below.

What was the inspiration for the book?

I don’t know that there was a single moment of inspiration. I pitched the book during the peak of Obama-mania, so there was a lot of that energy going around. As a writer and blogger, I felt like there was a need for a voice speaking about race without the earnestness that accompanies politics or an Oprah show. “Chappelle’s Show” was gone, “The Boondocks” had sort of faded, and I guess I thought I could sit in that space.

Negropedia seems to be an extension of your blog. What was the motivation in having the conversation take a different form?

For me, it was a natural evolution. You blog and develop an audience, and then you start thinking about a book. Although, my blog started when blogging was still a little more Wild, Wild West. Now blogging has matured into its own media landscape—it’s a specific medium, with a specific form: it’s very short-form, blurby, you need a punchy voice, and you have to be comfortable with the content being disposable. We tried to find a balance in the book, and collected some of the more casual blog stuff alongside more polished pieces.

Who is the audience for your book?

When I started the blog, I didn’t have an audience in mind. The audience just sort of came. It ended up being a real motley crew—I’ve got young Manhattan Internet-media folks, but I also have black kids who aren’t from an urban area; I’ve got academics, both teachers and students. I’ve never had an audience in mind. I think that’s part of the experience. Something like “The Hipster Handbook” or “Stuff White People Like,” obviously has a demographic and audience in mind, but the black experience, and dealing with that, does somehow feel like a tougher demographic to pin down, when talking about a hip-hop generation or a “post-Obama” or “post-racial” Internet generation.

In the book you compare the term “post-racial” to the term “postmodern,” calling them both liberal-arts bling. You write: “You flash it, but you don’t really need to. You never need to.” It sounds like you are saying the term doesn’t carry any weight.

To me, “post-racial” feels like a term we use when we want to have an intelligent conversation about race. It sets the tone for everyone to be, like, “We’re not having joke time,” or “We’re not having reckless racial profiling time”—I don’t know who has that! But it’s a tough term. I think any black person or minority American is going to laugh in the face of any post-racial, post-black post-definition. There’s no getting around it: being black, or whatever you are, is an existential fact of your identity. “Post-racial” is really just a gateway to nuanced race conversation, but semantically, it’s off: you almost want “most-racial,” a term that would allow you talk about the diversity and nuance of race.

You compare Norman Mailer’s “The Naked and The Dead” to Jay-Z’s “Reasonable Doubt.” You compare Susan Sontag to the rap duo Dead Prez. What other writers exude a sort of hip-hop cool?

Lately, I’ve been in an almost KRS-One state of mind: everyone is hip-hop. My favorite section in the book is “You Might Be A Rapper”: I really think everyone can access that creative, artfully aggressive sensibility. I’ve been fascinated for a long time with David Foster Wallace. One of his first books to come out was “Signifying Rappers,” (he co-wrote it with Mark Costello). It came out before the mid-nineties explosion, and it’s about Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, and De La Soul—all before Biggie and 2Pac and Jay-Z. I think of him as being very similar to Eminem, in the sense that there’s a hyper, caged-in intellectual sensibility that’s estranged, in some way, from the world it’s engaging with; someone who has these flairs of creativity and artistry, but still has a very strong integrity, a respect for formalism and craft. There is a lot of respect and history embedded in their work.

One of my favorite scenes from Ellison’s “Invisible Man” is the brief exchange between Brother Jack and the narrator during his stint in the Brotherhood. Brother Jack asks, “Why do you fellows always talk in terms of race?” and the narrator responds, “What other terms do you know?” So I guess my question is: Where does the conversation go from here?

In a way, when you write a book like “Negropedia,” that’s the moment when you turn into a character or persona. When the straight-forward, intellectual territory has been mined, it’s tough, at least from a creative standpoint, to be fresh and original. Negropedia is a very personal, idiosyncratic, and quirky manifestation of my perspective on race. Hopefully, it’s a gateway drug of sorts to more “Negropedias.” This is a time when minority Americans can use the voice of the Internet to post content and find an audience. The whole beauty and joy of this moment is that we aren’t constrained by the paradigms of the past, the orthodoxy surrounding the conversation about civil rights, politics, and social activism. Now, even though many of the same issues still exist, there are more outlets and opportunities to voice your quirky, personal take on something—and it can become a joke, or a play, or a Web series like Awkward Black Girl, or it becomes a Web site like the Root or Black Voices, or even gets channeled into more mainstream cultural or political entertainment. I think that’s where the conversation goes. It becomes a sort of prism, some fractured perspective that you can’t predict.

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